


The Missing Piece

by jeromevaleska



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Heavy Angst, IT IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN CURE THE ACHE IN MY CHEST, Memories, Memory Loss, POV Second Person, Reader-Insert, Recovered Memories, Resurrection, Tumblr Prompt, also I WANT MY GINGER BABY BACK WHEN WILL HE AWAKE FROM INDIAN HILL???, but lots of angst, just forewarning ya, not sure what else to tag this as, ok just enjoy sorry for whining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 10:37:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6800344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeromevaleska/pseuds/jeromevaleska
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jerome remembers bits and pieces about you after he comes back from Indian Hill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Missing Piece

You were a tickling sensation of hair against his face. A soft laugh. Smooth, delicate skin gliding against his. That breathy whisper of a name that he somehow knew was his.

"Jerome..." the way you said his name, like a prayer. From your mouth, it was holy, and everything else didn't seem to matter except you. His hands were on your hips as you laid on top of him. He gazed at you, but he couldn't make out any of your features. It was as if his eyes were covered with a hazy film, leaving them out of his vision. He brushed your hair back away from your face, tucking loose strands behind your ears. As he did so, he pressed his thumb along your cheekbones in an attempt to memorize all the details on your face. He heard a soft sigh of pleasure, and found himself chuckling lowly in his throat.

He could be gentle with you. Loving. All things he had forgotten existed before. Your name came to his tongue. He opened his lips, but all sound seemed to cease – fade, and the world blurred further.

His eyes then shot open and he bolted upright almost immediately. It was another vivid dream. He found these dreams disturbing because of how happy he was, and that was a feeling he was no longer familiar with.

He didn't have many memories.

The few that he does seem mismatched and patchy. Confusing, muffled, muddled. Blurry.

The feel of lips, soft and sweet against his own. He wasn't sure how he knew that they were lips, but he did. Just as he remembered running his fingers through feather-light hair, that his hands tingled with from once being tangled in - even though he couldn't quite remember what it looked like.

Blood. Lots of blood. Blood on his hands, on a knife, staining his skin, his clothes. Blood spurting from an artery, pouring from a vein, dribbling from a shallow wound, pooling on the ground, drying in the sun. A river of red. He knew the different colors, which shade would come from which place. His blood, other people's blood. He could smell it, the stale heaviness of it, like the back of your throat after you drink something sour. He knew the sticky-wet texture of it as it hardened beneath his fingernails like it always belonged there.

Pain. He remembered feeling every kind of pain he could ever imagine to inflict – has inflicted – on another, in his own body. Every bone that could break, every inch of skin that could be burned, cut, bruised. He knew hunger – starvation – and unbelievable thirst. He knew agony like an old friend.

He saw the quirks of a soft, playful smile that belonged to full, plush lips, a smile that threatened to light up the entire world, rosy cheeks along with dimples peeking through, nose scrunching in amusement, and he felt a sting of worry, although he wasn't sure why. The tangy taste of hard candy, bittersweet on his tongue.

There were hands. Hands he could almost feel drift across his skin sometimes, like a ghost in the night. It was if they've ran across the plains and landscapes of his body so often that they had branded his very soul, and he couldn't shake them.

The scrape of pencil against paper lingered in his mind, a comforting sound, even though he had nothing to associate it with. It drifted over him as he fell asleep, like fog across a bay.

He woke up from dreams expecting a warm body to be tangled up in his. Expecting a soft pair of lips to be planted upon his. He woke up feeling cold and hollow. His fist clenched around nothing, where he had thought it had been curled up in someone else's cotton clothes. The space beside him, where there should be a person, was empty. He woke up feeling like there was something missing, like he wouldn't be whole without it, which meant more like there was someone missing.

Perhaps forgetting was one of the side effects of being resurrected. He remembered who he was before, the kind of life he lived in the streets of Gotham, his victims, and why he killed them but he couldn't recall much beyond those recollections. He supposed he had Dr. Strange to thank for that.

There were half bitten sentences that rung through his head when he heard certain words, certain phrases. Not the begging and screaming he became all so familiar with. People asking him not to hurt them, begging him until their eyes were filled to the brim with tears. That he was used to. But there were different voices that echoed in his head. Sometimes the words were sung, sometimes they were soft, sometimes they were angry. Some of them were sad, others filled with laughter. Occasionally, it was in his own voice, but more often it was not. The memory of you came to him in fragments. Bits and pieces that he couldn't quite place back together.

From time to time, someone would speak to him and the end of whatever they were saying gets drowned out by different voices in his mind. Every once in a while, the words came from nowhere, filtering into his consciousness, whispers from missing memories.

Every now and again, he would react to something in a way he didn't fully understand. He would flinch at the sound of heels clicking on a marbled floor, shudder at the sight of any sort of affectionate gestures, he just couldn't piece everything together.

You. The girl he knew ever since he was a meek child at the circus. He almost remembered you. Almost, but not quite. It's your face, it seemed vaguely familiar, and it made him feel curious. But it was your voice that really did it for him. That voice had haunted his dreams. He knew what that voice sounded like when it laughed, he just didn't know how. He had no idea where he learned that sound, but he thought it might just be the most comforting that he's ever heard.

Not that he could be sure. He wasn't really sure of anything these days, except for his one objective, the one reason why he was brought back in the first place. The sad thing was he knew he should be grateful that he was alive and kicking, but he didn't feel completely himself, and if he didn't feel completely himself then what was the point of anything? Completely broken-down, completely torn. His heart ripped to shreds, only the gnawing ache of the ice inside his heart reminded him that he was still alive, still suffering.

J, you'd call him that. That made his head ache, his chest feel abnormally tight, his breath coming quick and scared.

The most important thing was that it made him feel at all. He wasn't used to feeling things.

But there was one other thing.

A hungry, all-consuming kind of feeling. It's warmth and light and longing. Protective and urgent, gentle and overwhelming. It rushes over him like the roar of a train over tracks that run above the heads of passersby. It swells up inside of him like the jazzy tunes that cascade across his thoughts. It wants and it needs and it's a gaping hole inside of him that he doesn't know how to fill. It threatens to not only consume his heart, but his entire being. His life, his essence, his soul. Everything.

This is what Jerome remembers most. This is the thing that hurts most to remember.

But then one night, the memories flashed by in his mind of him kissing you one day just outside his trailer, chill evening air lingering on the circus grounds that would soon to be swallowed by the night. Light touches, hidden glances, mumbled words of affection covered behind pranks and laughter and sneaky comments were how it all began.

He had been concealing his feelings for you for years until he finally gathered the courage to make the long-awaited move both of you had been waiting for, and it flooded back to him in heaps and heaps. He recalled the excitement and a rush of blood to his head, warming him, making him even more reckless, a spark of desire in his eyes enough to engulf him whole. That moment right there, right then, was when things changed forever, and any of his concerns faded since he was about to melt in the light reflecting in your messy strands of hair, caressing sun-kissed skin that he always longed to touch, captivating and overwhelming and when he simply gave in to the force of nature in front of you two, bare and wild, he leaned in again to brush his lips against yours. He wished there was a way to live forever in that moment.

He recalled there was a hand grabbing his after the kiss broke, soothing and reassuring – a promise. Then your other hand reached around his neck to pull him closer, lips and tongue tasting and roaming, licking into his mouth with all the pure curiosity and eagerness so passionate that he wondered how he ever forgot it. There were memories, old and new and either way, they were painful and hard to remember. There were voices and silence, staring and closed eyes, and both were equally giving away the hurt of returning to a life that did no longer include the other one. 

You were his home, that once guided him, the person that was meant to be his light in the darkness, devoted and selfless and everything he ever wanted. Everything he had ever dreamed of, a fleeting, beautiful dream. You were the blood pumping through his veins, the one who melted the ice inside of his bones. The realization of this loss was written in dull eyes, suddenly the air around him was so close to choking him, to making him crumble and fall apart.

His throat constricted painfully as your face flashed before his eyes. Your gentle waves of hair that always felt so unbelievably soft between his fingers. Your bright eyes that crinkled around the edges whenever you laughed. The familiar dimples in your cheeks when you smiled, just for him.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force the painful image from his mind. He missed you so much, more than words could ever say. He wanted to be away from the memories, of the night he and you had spent out in the open fields on the circus grounds, sitting on the blanket where you both would often have picnics before making love underneath the stars. He remembered the way the moonlight had made your delicate skin seem to shine with an iridescent glow had made his breath catch in his throat. Those nights would now forever be embedded in his mind as some of the happiest moments of his life.

He couldn't escape you, no matter how hard he tried. You haunted his dreams and his waking hours. Everywhere he looked, he would see something that would remind him of you. The universe was making it impossible to forget you, even if he wanted to.

"Come dance with me," you pleaded, your smile bright against your flushed face. The circus grounds were packed and the amount of body heat was causing tiny beads of perspiration to dot across your chest above your low-cut red dress. He loved that color on you.

He watched as your lower lip puckered out in a playful pout when you noticed he was about to decline your offer. "Please?"

He smiled. He found it rather difficult to deny you of anything. All you had to do was bat those large, piercing eyes and flash that heart-stopping smile of yours and he was lost.

Your grin widened as you watched his resolve crumble. Slipping your hands into his, you pulled him from his seat on a haystack and dragged him onto the dance floor where everyone was dancing away to the sound of loud music.

Your arms wound their way around his neck at the same time his hands found your waist, drawing you into the warmth of his body. He could feel the delicious tingle of the fabric of your dress underneath your skin, calling out to his. You gazed up at him from under long lashes, sending a pleasant shudder coursing through him. "Don't look so nervous, Jerome. Don't worry about everyone else," you murmured, standing on your tiptoes to press a soft kiss against the tip of his chin. "It's just you and me out here."

He hit back a groan when you started swaying against him. His grip on your hips tightened their hold as your fingers slid into his hair and pulled his face towards yours. He could feel his breathing quicken as he pressed his forehead against yours. "You are so beautiful," he breathed just before claiming your mouth in a searing kiss.

You giggled against his lips, your arms tightening around him in an effort to get even closer.

He loved that sound with everything he had. He cherished them as if they were a reward for his ears alone.

Thousands of memories of lazy days and long nights, of crinkled eyes and laughter, all to form a timeline of the best moments of his life. All blasting through his brain in the exact way they didn't in the last moments. You had been with him through rough times as well as the good, and he needed someone like that in his life because he knew you gave him that kind of once in a lifetime feeling, that fluttery feeling, devotion, desire, trust and warmth. The hardest thing to explain was the desperation of losing this feeling, holding onto things that were drifting away, out of reach, further until they were just memories.

He never got the chance to tell you just how much he cared for you, and now he would never get that chance. He still needed to see those smiles, see those eyes light up in happiness and love, and hopefully, hopefully – feel those warm lips press against his own again. Every one of those feather-light loving touches, each gentle kiss, each lingering glance stole his breath away, and his heart cracked just that little bit more at all those bittersweet memories.

Then one day, in the dead of night, he felt something compelling him back to the street where your house was located. It was peculiar because it was almost as if his body knew exactly where it was being dragged before his mind could catch up with his steps. The freezing winds of the night nipped at his skin and cut so deep that it gnawed at his bones. He was sure by now his cheeks were bright red from the bitter cold, but he just reminded himself why he was here. He sucked in a deep breath before he took a step upon your porch, then another when he breathed in the familiar scent of this building, the place he visited when he needed to get away from it all, the place where he knew he would be safe, the place where you both laid tangled in the sheets, the only place that felt like home.

But then he took one more step on your porch, and when he did, a loud creak emitted that seemed to echo around the streets. The second he heard the footsteps that made their way to the door to your house, he bolted away from your porch and hid away in the shadow of the nights where you wouldn't be able to find him.

You opened your door and looked around to see what was the source of that sudden noise that just came from outside. You didn't see anything, except for the whispering of leaves flying about in the cold winds and shadowed clouds that hung up in the sky. But still, you looked around your surroundings more because you felt a familiar sense of someone's presence lingering around your house, and there was sudden twinge in your chest as a frown took over your features. Still nothing. You waited a moment longer, then another, but it only proved to be in vain.

"Hello?" you asked, your voice sounding a shiver down his spine after having not heard it for so long. "Anyone there?" you questioned, and walked out to glance about, hoping to chase this strange sensation that kept gnawing at your heart. This annoying, worrisome feeling in your stomach that wouldn't go away. Again, nothing. Maybe it really was nothing. But it didn't feel like it. You heaved a sigh, and then stepped back up to your porch, slowly shutting the door. Though, even as you closed it, you stared outside, still wondering what – who made that noise.

He didn't reappear from the shadows, in fear that you would catch the sight of him in one of your windows. The ache in his chest throbbed harder, more persistent. He realized that he wasn't ready for you to see him like this. No, not yet, at least. Possibly someday soon – maybe. He was just grateful to hear the soft, sweet sound of your voice. It was enough for him, for now.


End file.
